[Big Dave]

A little railroad history:

During World War II, the railroads were nationalized as part of the war effort. Trains were run essentially by the War. Dept. Thet performed good service but the War Dept neglected the railroads. Track and rolling stock was worn out. To get them back into shape required a lot of money.

Back then, railroad rates were regulated tightly by the feds. Rates were set (obviously) for political reasons, and changing a rate took months of hearings. As a result the wartime rates kept the railroads from generating enough cash to repair and modernize track, bridges, and cars.

At the same time a new technology had become available for motive power: the diesel-electric locomotive. The diesel was less labor intensive to maintain and was far more fuel-efficient. Further (although nobody gave a rip then) the diesel was a lot cleaner than steam engines. The only thing you could say for the steam engine was that it ran on domestic coal.

About this time, John L. Lewis - the Chairman of the UMW, made the decision to raise miners' pay even if that meant coal lost its share of the energy market. As late as 1950 the US got the majority of its energy from coal. As a result, coal lost its cost advantage and the steam engine was as dead as OJ's acting career.

At the end of World War II both railroading and coal mining were incredibly labor-intensive. There were more people involved in railroading and coal mining than there were college graduates as late as 1949. An underground mine produced about 2 tons per day per man - Tennessee Ernie Ford notwithstanding. Every railroad had a roundhouse (that employed between 500 and 1,000 men) every hundred miles. A full days work for a train crew was 100 miles because that was as far as a steam locomotive would go without breaking down. It would go 50 miles before it needed more coal and water.

Railroads are inherently lousy at door-to-door shipping unless you were a big enough shipper/receiver to justify delivery of a whole trainload of stuff. Other wise you loaded/unloaded at a railroad "depot" which was a platform beside a siding. How fast you got your delivery depended on your tariff (rate). Keep in mind the government set the tariff. If your stuff was low tariff, you might wait months for delivery. No kidding, months. The feds controlled the rates but not deliveries.

The car industry, from the days of Billy Durant and Henry Ford knew they depended on the railroads for delivery of bulky raw materials/components and their product. So they pressured the feds into a high tariff which got them fast, reliable delivery. The auto plants were big enough to justify whole trainload deliveries.

Back to the diesel-electric. Diesels were energy and labor-efficient but per HP, they were expensive up front. A 6,000 Kanawha cost less to buy than the four GP-7s that replaced it. But the railroads coughed up the staggering sums needed to dieselize and by 1958 the steam locomotive was history. But this came at a price. Track and cars were gundecked to pay for dieselization. Worse yet the diesels were new tech and the early models obsolesced rapidly. Before the last of the steam locomotives were scrapped the GP7 (and F-7) were eclipsed by the GP-9. Some GP-7s stayed in yard and branch service into the 1980s. The GP-9s were in turn eclipsed by th GP-18s, GP--24s, then the turbocharged GP-30s and GP-35s. Then the 645 engine came along and the GP-38/GP-39/GP-40 family took charge. At that point the obsolescence rate slowed.

Problem was not that the diesel-electric had totally matured, but the railroad, with their unresponsive rates and specialization to big shippers/receivers were going broke. Trucks could and did change rates as market conditions needed. No bureaucrat could keep up even if they wanted to. Shippers/receivers decentralized into smaller entities and full trainload deliveries became more and more scarce. A number of "name" railroad went under. The might New York Cenral was forced to merge with the Pennsylvania Railroad and thet became the Penn Central. The Penn Central went belly-up within five years and was taken over by the feds who kept it on tax dollar life support for over a decade. When the Rock Island went broke in 1978, Congress realized that the federal government was the problem. In 1979, the Staggers Act de-regulated the railroads. That was the beginning of the road back for the railroads. But first, they had a lot of dead wood to cut away. During this time I worked for what was called The Chessie System. In1977 the had 22,000 miles of track, 240,000 cars and 3,000 locomotives. When I left in 1985 they had 14,000 miles of track, 80,000 cars and 2,200 locotives and were making decent money.

I won't even go into the union featherbedding and restrictive work rules. When I left the Chessie System had 17 different unions.

So when you give me this routine about bad management I bristle. The railroads have had a tough half-century and maybe the fact they are around at all is a testament to just how good that managemnent was.

A lot of what railroad carry today is indeed intermodal. Not much TOFC (trailer-on-flat-car) but rather COFC (container-on-flat-car). This combines the long-distance efficiency on the train with the door-to-door flexibilty of the truck.